Deadly

Martin Chandler | 8:02am GMT 23 March 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 256
Author: Peel, Mark
Publisher: Pitch
Rating: 5 stars

Back in the last century Mark Peel wrote three fine cricketing biographies, of Colin Cowdrey, Ken Barrington and Colin Milburn. I am guessing that at that point real life got in the way, and that it is retirement that his given him the time in recent years to re-emerge and give us the lives of Mike Brearley, Douglas Jardine, Raymond Illingworth and Roy Gilchrist.

And those four were just as impressive as Peel’s earlier efforts, so I was always expecting that this biography of Derek Underwood would be worth reading, and I have to say that all things considered it must be regarded as its author’s best yet.

As with most cricket books when I first opened Deadly it was to look through the photographs and read the acknowledgments, two aspects of any book that give a very strong indication as to how good the narrative will be.

As to the photographs there were one or two I had seen before, but then you can’t have a biography of Underwood that doesn’t contain the iconic image of him and his teammates at the denouement of the Oval Test in the 1968 Ashes series. For the most part however all were new to me. Many it turned out, on looking at the acknowledgments, came from Underwood’s daughter, and that family co-operation and the number of Underwood’s contemporaries who had been spoken to made it clear that Deadly had been thoroughly researched.

There is no doubt in my mind but that Underwood remains the best England spin bowler I have seen, and the occasionally advanced argument that he wasn’t really a spinner at all is one of the issues that is well and truly put to bed in Deadly. Another recurring theme is just what a pleasant man Underwood was, but a fierce competitor at the same time. The well known description of him by Geoffrey Boycott remains the best summary, that he had the face of a choirboy, the demeanour of a civil servant and the ruthlessness of a rat catcher.

Underwood’s successes on the pitch, both for Kent and England, are well known, albeit stories well worth retelling, particularly with the input from so many who were involved. As to Underwood’s life outside the game he had given up something of himself in a 1975 autobiography Beating the Bat, but his later career was in business and not in the media, and he was never a man to court publicity.

Despite Underwood’s essentially equable temperament he inevitably found himself caught up in a number of controversies, all related to the difficulties that cricket had over his career in properly remunerating its best players, and Peel dwells on each of them.

The first was something I had only been vaguely aware of, that being the concerns that England skipper Ray Illingworth had during the 1970/71 Ashes tour when the MCC and ACB decided unilaterally to add an extra Test match to the series to replace a game that was rained off without making any additional payment to the players. Interestingly in view of events that were to follow Underwood was, at a meeting of the England players, the sole member of the party who did not support Illingworth’s militancy.

Despite the line Underwood took in 1970/71 he was one of the few English players to sign a contract with Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. By then a married man Underwood’s outlook was not the same, but the remarkable fact that in those pre central contract days he had not been selected for a full series in as many as 13 of the series for which he was available is testament to the fragility of a cricket career at the time.

Finally in 1982, by which time the end of the road was still five summers away, Underwood toured South Africa with the so called ‘Rebels’ an action which, like signing for WSC, cost him a ban from playing for England – how many more than 297 Test wickets might Underwood have ended up with had he remained the ‘Establishment Man’ of 1970/71?

The one potential difficulty with writing a biography of Underwood is that it is impossible not to admire the man, and a less than satisfying hagiography is a risk. Peel’s way of avoiding that danger is to rely in large part on the words of others and leave the judgments to them, and that is something he does very well. He also manages to tell the sad story of Underwood’s declining years in a way that shirks nothing, yet is empathetic and not in intrusive.

Deadly was a book that, had not pangs of hunger overcome me, I would have happily read from start to finish in one sitting. It is not quite perfect as, inexplicably, it lacks the statistics of the career of a man for whom the numbers are a not insignificant part of his legacy. But I am not going to be churlish and despite that one grumble this one still gets five stars. It is a masterful tribute to one of English cricket’s all time greats.